Everybody talks about “equity” these days, but what they seek when they do so is anything but equity. They instead seek an advantage of some sort, claiming recompense for some unrelated event, and in so doing they absolutely destroy the rule of law. When there is always an exception to the rule, the rules become meaningless. The eventual result will be chaos – the kind of chaos where equity is completely crushed by strength. We are facing a number of such stories right now.
It has infected our sports – particularly college football. Lane Kiffin, who never met a university he would not divorce in an ugly fashion, may have found a technical exception in the rules to allow him to add professional football players to his roster, but he has severely violated the spirit of the rules. Even if the players in question were only paid by NFL teams to try out and they never made the pro rosters. Admittedly, as we have allowed college athletes to be paid and opened the transfer portal, the rules have gotten pretty fuzzy. Which is all the more reason for programs to act with restraint, lest the rules disappear altogether and college football becomes simply an extension of the NFL. But no, there is always an exception it seems.
Say what you will, Michigan got beat Saturday – by little, tiny, insignificant Western Michigan. It was equity in action. It was the little school beating up the big school. It was the kind of story everybody loves in sports – the underdog prevails against the mighty favorite. Until the rules don’t matter and then the mighty favorite is deemed the winner. The little guy no longer has a chance. Isn’t that the very anthesis of equity?
Even the religious seem to forget the rules when it is convenient.
But nowhere is this tendency to ignoring the rules more evident than in the Lindsey Clancy case. I have completely ignored the case until it became impossible. I haven’t reviewed the evidence or the testimony. But some jurors were interviewed yesterday and if what was said in the interview is truth then the rules were completely ignored. Here is the crux of the matter:
“He was very arrogant,” another juror, Paula Devlin, added. “He just completely disregarded the information that [nurses on the jury] gave,” referencing opinions on the concentration of antidepressants and antipsychotics in her blood at the time of the murders.
I’m no lawyer, but I have been on a jury. Sadly this jury and the one I was on sound like they were similar. One thing I know from my jury service – it is the jury’s duty to consider the evidence presented in the courtroom – and only that evidence. Did the nurses on the jury testify in the courtroom? Of course not. Therefore, any information they may be in possession of is not evidence in the case and the “holdout” acted completely correctly in ignoring that information. He wasn’t the least bit arrogant – he was just applying the rules, and apparently the only person on the jury willing to do so. The only reason to call the guy arrogant is to try and shame him into bending, if not breaking, the rules.
College football is entertainment and all this furor just makes it more entertaining, even as it destroys the hopes for success of all us small school alums. But murder trials and Article VI of the Constitution are a different matter. The rules in those situations level the playing field and create equity. If the rules are eliminated, then it becomes purely a matter of survival of the fittest – the law of the jungle. Nobody wants that – nobody.
